May 17, 2007 will

Numbers don't lie

My triops hatched today. I am now the proud father of four tiny crustaceans, and there are more on the way. They are barely visible - just little white specs, but I can make out a pair of swimmerets.

Apparently they double in size every day. They are about a millimeter in length at the moment, so by this time tomorrow they will be 2 millimeters long. They live about 60 days, so eventualy they will be 2 to the power of 60 millitmeters in length. Let's see... thats 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 millimeters, 1,152,921,504,606,846 meters or 1,152,921,504,606 kilometers (*). Oh. My. God. We're gonna need a bigger boat.

* For Americans, that's 716,392,209,599 miles

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Mike Watkins

[Will's evil laughter still rings out over the cosmos as he contemplates a pack of 700 billion mile long creatures doing his bidding]

You damn fool, you've killed us all!

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Robert Wright

I would assume the doubling is in volume not length. So assumming they are cubes with a linear dimension of 1mm. After 60 days they are only 2^60^(1/3) long, or 1,048,576 mm or about a 1 km long. Still you need a bigger boat.

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Will


I would assume the doubling is in volume not length. So assumming they are cubes with a linear dimension of 1mm. After 60 days they are only 2^60^(1/3) long, or 1,048,576 mm or about a 1 km long. Still you need a bigger boat.

Ah, good point. Come to think of it, a 700 billion mile long crustacean was kind of absurd.